Both candidates fearfully silent on North Korea

According to a recent report from The Institute for Science and International Security, North Korea, if not stopped, will have built up to 48 nuclear weapons by 2015.

New North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un 311 R.
(photo credit:REUTERS)

With now over $2 billion in campaign money spent and election day upon us, both
President Obama and Governor Romney have been disturbingly silent about one of
the most urgent humanitarian and security emergencies the United States and the
world faces today: North Korea.

While legitimate alarm about Iran’s
progress toward attaining a nuclear weapon has dominated much of the foreign
policy debate, North Korea’s possession of up to 18 plutonium bombs, aggressive
pursuit of new nuclear technology and capabilities including the enrichment of
uranium, persistent nuclear and missile tests in defiance of international law
and multiple UN Security Council resolutions, and role as the world’s number one
nuclear weapons technology proliferator (most of which has gone to rogue regimes
such as the dictatorships in Iran and Syria) is a subject which has been almost
completely untouched by either campaign.

According to a recent report
from The Institute for Science and International Security, North Korea, if not
stopped, will have built up to 48 nuclear weapons by 2015.

Like Tehran,
the leaders in Pyongyang have regularly called for the annihilation of one of
America’s closest allies, in this case South Korea. Beyond the genocidal
rhetoric, the DPRK has a long history of routinely killing and/or abducting
South Koreans. In March 2010 an unprovoked attack resulted in the sinking of a
South Korean navy ship, killing 46 sailors, and in November of the same year
another unprovoked attack, this time on South Korean territory, resulted in the
death of four innocent Koreans; both cases were referred to the International
Criminal Court for possible war crimes yet have essentially gone
unpunished.

But most troubling of all, the North Korean regime is
actively committing mass atrocities at this very moment within its prison camp
system, where up to 250,000 innocents, one-third of whom are children, are
currently being forced to do slave labor on starvation rations and are commonly
subjected to systematic and heinous torture, rape and execution.

Numerous
reports over the last decade, including from the UN special rapporteur on the
situation of human rights in North Korea, have analyzed a growing body of
defector testimony and come to the conclusion that crimes against humanity as
defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court are taking place
in these camps, year after year, with impunity. North Korea’s exploitative and
discriminatory food policy, which has been the primary cause of as many as four
million deaths since the mid- 1990s, has also been determined to be a crime
against humanity.

In addition, the DPRK regime is actively targeting for
destruction every group which is protected under the UN Genocide Convention
through its policy of killing the half-Chinese children of North Korean women
forcibly repatriated by China (constituting genocide on national, ethnical and
racial grounds) and through its systematic annihilation of its indigenous
religious population and their families (genocide on religious grounds) while
regularly employing each of the five acts defined as genocidal by the Genocide
Convention through (a) executions and state-sanctioned murders, (b) the
systematic use of torture, (c) state-induced mass starvation in political prison
camps and elsewhere, (d) forcible abortions and infanticide and (e) the forcible
transfer and enslavement of children.

Romeo Dallaire and Samantha Power, published a report on
December 19 of last year which found conclusively that North Korea has indeed
committed genocide as defined in Raphael Lemkin’s 1948 Convention, stating that
there is “ample proof that genocide has been committed and mass killing is still
under way in North Korea.”

Nowhere has US foreign policy failed more
explicitly and at such a profound cost than in North Korea. America’s altogether
unethical approach over the past two decades has been to remain silent about
North Korea’s human rights crimes, in spite of the fact that they are tantamount
to genocide and crimes against humanity under international law, in an attempt
to gain leverage in negotiations with North Korea about its nuclear program.
This approach has won neither peace nor security for the US and its allies but,
on the contrary, only served to embolden a genocidal regime numerous studies
indicate has been able to misappropriate vast resources for nuclear development
with aid provided by the United States; some of which was attained through
agreements that North Korea reneged on and the rest procured through the
diversion of aid intended for starving populations.

If the US would have
stopped playing North Korea’s game and properly addressed the human rights
emergency 10 years ago, by which time evidence of crimes against humanity in
North Korea had already become exhaustive and well-known throughout the US
foreign policy establishment, not only would America, her allies, and the world
be much safer today, countless lives in North Korea could have been
saved.

In 2006, the late Czech president Vaclav Havel, Nobel Laureate
Elie Wiesel and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik
commissioned a report which called for the UN Security Council to adopt a
resolution urging open access to North Korea for humanitarian relief and for the
release of political prisoners.

Again, in 2009, former UN special
rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea Vitit Muntarbhorn
urged for the “totality of the United Nations system, especially the Security
Council,” to be authorized “to take measures to prevent egregious violations and
protect people from victimization.”

The United States has yet to even
bring this burning issue before the Security Council, or North Korea for that
matter. The time is now for a fundamental shift in US policy on North Korea to
prioritize the lives, basic freedoms and human rights of the North Korean
people.

The writer is a founding member of the Worldwide Coalition to
Stop Genocide in North Korea, a non-profit working to provide life-saving
resources to victims and their families within North Korea.

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